High Impact Practices

High Impact Practices

In 2004, the UW-Superior Faculty Senate endorsed five initiatives designed to further the campus public liberal arts mission. Each initiative, with direction from advisory councils, provides or directs activities throughout the campus that help prepare students to become liberally educated graduates equipped for 21st century lives, careers and life-long learning.

First Year Experience (FYE)

First Year Experience delivers a package of initiatives designed to introduce students into the campus community and our public liberal arts mission. These initiatives offer incoming students a set of experiences that integrate them within UW-Superior community academically, socially, and culturally.

FYE also includes an academic focus with First Year Seminars and an Early Warning System. First Year Seminars are designed to introduce students to the liberal arts through active and collaborative learning, critical thinking, and reflective judgment. Students have the opportunity to choose from an array of diverse topics that are selected to challenge and engage students in seminars limited to 15 students. The Early Warning System alerts students and advisors when there is an academic risk so that appropriate interventions can be set in motion.

Academic Service-Learning

The term "academic service-learning" (AS-L) refers to community-based learning opportunities that are embedded within credit-bearing course to enhance students' understanding of the course learning objectives.

The AS-L initiative aims to make UW-Superior a regional leader in service-learning pedagogy, thus providing a distinctively public quality to UW-Superior's liberal arts mission.

To actualize this objective, UW-Superior has created the Center for Academic Service-Learning (CAS-L). The center's staff works with faculty members to infuse AS-L opportunities throughout the curriculum and coordinates efforts to secure grant funding for on-going AS-L activities.

Writing Across the Curriculum

To this end, it provides support for students through a writing center where they can meet with trained consultants concerning the writing they are doing in their courses, whatever the discipline. The program also provides support to faculty and teaching staff who make or want to make student writing a meaningful part of their courses. Finally, the program sponsors a variety of writing events on campus and beyond, such as readings by local and regional creative writers and essay competitions.

Global Awareness

UW-Superior offers students a variety of options for enhancing global awareness as a vital part of becoming a liberally educated citizen of the 21st Century world.

The Office of International Programs helps students discover and engage in study abroad opportunities, recruits and works with international students from all over the globe and arranges global awareness campus programs. UW-Superior students have opportunities for studying a variety of foreign languages and/or to take a minor in Global Studies.

Senior Experience

Each department has a required Senior Year Experience which builds on basic liberal education skills of quantitative analysis, communication and critical thinking to create a culminating experience in a major field of study.

Each student is required to make his or her Senior Experience work publicly known to the campus and wider community. These public presentations of Senior Experiences are uniquely designed by each discipline in accordance with expectations of the particular field of study.